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Revenue from SCOsource licenses is expected to be minimal in the first quarter as the Company finalizes license agreements with vendors and continues to implement its intellectual property license initiative...

...Operating expenses relating to the Company's UNIX business are anticipated to remain flat during fiscal 2004. Expenses associated with SCOsource initiatives are expected to increase in fiscal 2004 as the Company pursues and expands the scope of its legal strategy to enforce and protect its UNIX intellectual property...

If the above information is correct, SCO revenue in Q1/2004 will be around 15 M$ and net loss could be >5-10 M$. It seems they don't get more money soon, they will be out of business before summer.

After seeing the number posted on/., I dialed it up and listened. I have to say that, even though I know what they are doing is messed up, they put some very posive spin on thier situation, albiet that is the purpose of this conference call.One of the first questions in the Q and A period was "If I pay the $699, do I have rights to use the source and continue to run Linux?" Darl very neatly sidestepped half the question and answered "Yes, you can continue to run the binary (emphasis mine) within the agreement."

From that, I take it that if you pay, you can run the kernel, but they won't say you can play with it.

SCO is a member of the Open Group and participated in the development of those standards. The FTC has sued Rambus for doing the same thing with JEDEC DRAM standards-- you can't participate in standards development if you're later going to claim ownership of the technologies involved!

NO. You cannot slap another license or copyright header on BSD code. I do not know how this rumour got started, but the BSD license is very clear. You must retain the BSD copyright notice in the source code, and, in the case of binary redistribution, you must have the software display the BSD license. If you read the copyright information for MS Windows, for example, either on the Windows installation CD, or, IIRC, at the bottom of the EULA flashed during installation, the BSD copyright notice is there.

If a Linux kernel programmer took some header files from FreeBSD or 4.4BSD, for example, but removed the BSD copyright notice, that is a violation of the BSD license terms. HOWEVER, that does not mean that SCO was wronged. The only party that could sue for violation of the BSD license is, of course, the Regents of the University of California. AFAIK, but IANAL.

I have a little reality check for you people who think SCO is gonna get shit for this little pump and dump:

-Our esteemed Commander and Cheif pumped and dumped his little oil company and sold all his shares 2 days before it went bankrupt. The appropriate investigative organizations where politely told to bug off.

-The above's best friend and cheif campain supporter via donations was the CEO of Enron. Need I say more?

-Worldcom went bankrupt over executive fraud and now has a cushy contract in Iraq.

-Microsoft pretty much got let off the hook as soon as someone they "donated" money to got the presidency.

-Our Vice President is busy riding a gigantic $100,000 a month retirement golden parachute from his company, Halburton, with strangely enough is getting the most, best, and highest paying government contracts.

What makes you guys think that ANYTHING bad will happen to SCO because of what they are doing? Wake up.

Repubilicans...More to the point Dean has been more open to reforming DMCA than say Bush and his money grabbing crowies. If we aew to have any serious effect with this president for now vote the democrats. By voting Green..your going to end up like the florida 2000 race, splits for the democrats there by vote goes to the republicans...

Accept hypothetically that some Linux coder got a little too happy with his cut and paste from BSD code and left out some copyrights.

It's not like that. The coder could well have been Linus himself, and the reason is below (verbatim copy of a comment posted to LWN, emphasis mine):

(Posted Dec 22, 2003 18:03 UTC (Mon) by doitroygsbre) (Post reply)

IANAL

Ok, I read an article on groklaw (I think) that made a pretty good guess as to what SCO's claim is. They are claiming that the settlement reached between BSD and novell required that certain files in BSD have copyright notices added. The files that SCO is complaining about were added to linux before the settlement was reached and since the settlement was only made known to Novell and the BSD developers (sorry, can't quite remember exactly who was involved in the settlement) no one knew to add the copyright notices to linux. Now that SCO has possibly inherited the Novell side of the settlement, they're trying to claim copyright infringement because linux has these files without the notices. Even though they were released under the BSD license without the notices before the settlement.

Oh well, I'm starting to wonder if I'll live long enough to see this whole mess sorted

>>Accept hypothetically that some Linux coder got a little too happy with his cut and paste from BSD code and left out some copyrights.

>In Linux 2.0.36 kernel there is a networking headder file where the BSD licence is gone and the coder admits that they took the code from FreeBSD.

>So you say 'coder got a little too happy' I say 'thief' and Darl has to have lawyers convince a judge that is was a theft.

Copyright violations aren't theft, they're (follow this closely, it's tricky) copyright violations. They are not called theft because they're different. Different act, different name. Told you it was tricky.

Where does Darl come in? It's BSD's copyright; did BSD make Darl their agent? I don't think so. If there was a screwup (which remains to be shown), the quarrel is between BSD and Linux, with no room at all in there for SCO.

>>Then all that needs to be done is add the copyright notices back in.

>Gee, what about actual PUNISHMENT for breaking the law?

The usual, when there's a GPL violation, is that the violation cease, at least when the FSF is enforcing the terms of the agreement. I suspect that it would take some pretty egregious bad behavior, and some serious profits involved, to get a court to actually see monetary damages as being in any way appropriate.

As you know, certain of the Berkeley Software Distribution ("BSD") source code files require that further distributions of products containing all or portions of the software, acknowledge within their advertising materials that such products contain software developed by UC Berkeley and its contributors.

Specifically, the provision reads:

" * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software* must display the following acknowledgement:* This product includes software developed by the University of* California, Berkeley and its contributors."

Effective immediately, licensees and distributors are no longer required to include the acknowledgement within advertising materials. Accordingly, the foregoing paragraph of those BSD Unix files containing it is hereby deleted in its entirety.

William HoskinsDirector, Office of Technology LicensingUniversity of California, Berkeley

I agree. We are culturally bankrupt. No one asks the tough questions and when politicians dodge the questions there is no penalty to pay. And then you have all these radio talk show host that simply trying to get you to buy their books. It is disgusting. America as it is today is not the World it was envisioned to be. We have inapt public and weaselly politicians....a very deadly combination.

Oh, but SCO uses different errno.h files depending on the situation. I tried hard to include a fragment of the errno.h but the lameness filter totally prevented me from doing that. It complained about too many junk characters, but how can I be responsible for the junk in SCO header files? Some logic from errno.h:

The information in this file is provided for the exclusive use of
the licensees of The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. Such users have the
right to use, modify, and incorporate this code into other products
for purposes authorized by the license agreement provided they include
this notice and the associated copyright notice with any such product.
The information in this file is provided "AS IS" without warranty.

Here are the comments from an older version of the same file, specifically 91/06/06. I wonder why they've dropped Microsoft from the copyrights list?

UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T
Portions Copyright 1976-1990 AT&T
Portions Copyright 1980-1989 Microsoft Corporation
Portions Copyright (C) 1983-1991 The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The information in this file is provided for the exclusive use of
the licensees of The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. Such users have the
right to use, modify, and incorporate this code into other products
for purposes authorized by the license agreement provided they include
this notice and the associated copyright notice with any such product.
The information in this file is provided "AS IS" without warranty.
Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988 AT&T
All Rights Reserved

THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
The copyright notice above does not evidence any
actual or intended publication of such source code.

A lot of those delays stem from the simple fact that legal staff usually haven't got the vaguest understanding of how software is architected or compiled. They don't know that half the headers mentioned are part of ANSI and ISO C/C++ standards.

that is, unfortunately, irrelevant. if the file was blatantly copied from someone else's copyrighted implementation, then that does indeed constitute infringement. i don't think this is the case, i'm just playing devil's advocate.

They don't know that every single platform with a C compiler since the early '80s has had an "errno.h" header file.

i think you're confusing the compiler-supplied/usr/include/errno.h with the file that SCO is claiming is infringing. this file is a part of the kernel source, and would usually live at/usr/src/linux/include/asm-*/errno.h. (same or similar goes for the other allegedly-infringing files.)

now, the compiler-supplied errno.h in/usr/include contains a prominent copyright notice by the free software foundation. somehow i doubt they falsified that, and, even if they did, SCO would/should be going after the FSF and glibc and not linus torvalds and linux.

looking at the errno.h included with kernel source, it looks like a relatively boilerplate file. just a bunch of #defines for error codes. the only way you could really infer copyright infringement is from the comments on each line that says what the error code means. however, i would think that all these are documented somewhere, so even if SCO's file is identical, it's still arguable that in both cases the comments were copied verbatim from some specification document (where copying is possibly allowed).

looking through the files listed, it seems like all of them fall under this general premise - boilerplate kernel constants and macros for very basic stuff that's really hard and silly to try to implement any other way.

If you sue and lose, you pay for the defense. If you sue and win, you win your court awarded damages. If you are sued, and win, the plaintif pays your fees. If you are sued and lose, you pay the damages ordered by the court.

Besides, I would fell more encouraged to defend myself when I know I'm in the right. A high profile law firm would also be more inclined to take on such a case, as they know the plaintiff will have to pay their fees. The lawyers wouldn't have to worry about the little guy defendent being able to pay the tab.

Sort of. Title 17, section 1201 (a)(1)(A) says that it's illegal to "pick the lock". However, section 1203, which describes the civil remedies available, says that "any person injured by a violation of section 1201 or 1202 may bring civil action", so since no one can claim injury from fair use civil remedies are not available. Also, the criminal penalties in section 1204 only apply to "Any person who violates section 1201 or 1202 willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain", so, again, most fair use is clearly not prosecutable.

So circumvention for benign purposes is illegal, but has no penalty.

Creation of circumvention devices is trickier. Even if you don't gain financially from the devices, if some of your users use them to make infringing copies and the copyright holder can claim injury, you may be subject ot a civil suit. Further, if you do sell the devices you are clearly subject to criminal prosecution.

The corporation is its own entity. That's the whole point of a corporation - the business' liabilities are incurred by the corporation, not by its owners, so that if it fails, the owners don't lose their asses.

When you attack a corporation, you attack a business entity. The owners (shareholders) have nothing to do with it; in fact shareholders have a right to anonymity. Why do you think nobody goes to jail when Exxon destroys hundreds of miles of Alaskan coastline, but if you take your dirty oil and dump it in the storm drain and get caughty you get fined and maybe thrown in jail? It's because the shareholders aren't personally liable for the actions of the corporation. Again. That's the whole point of the corporation.

This takes a leap of one level of abstraction to get, so I can see why a lot of people don't comprehend this. Libertarians and conservatives tend to be concrete-reasoning keep-it-simple-stupid types that can't recognize a non-corporeal entity - unless it's a middle eastern diety that's been pounded into their head from birth.

In instant RunOff Voting there are the following problems:-Raising your vote for someone can cause them to lose (Monotonicity Criterion)-Lowering your vote for someone can cause them to win (Monotonicity Criterion)-A one on one comparison between the winner and any other candidate should show the winner being preferred in every pair. IRV doesn't do this. (Condorcet Criterion)-Doesn't scale at all. The possible votes are basically a factorial. Sorry if its hard to describe the formulaes. But the number of possibilites without truncation is N! with truncation its the summation of permutations. sPn (where s=1 to n-1) xPy = x!/(x-y)!

California's recall would of just not scaled with IRV. Suppose 100 candidates then the number of possible votes is 100! + 100!/2! + 100!/3! +... + 100!/98! + 100!/99!

-It's not easy to understand by the common guy (not/. ) imagine the news trying to explain HOW a candidate won.

A condorcet method would be a more sound election method, because basically the voter ranks the candidates. Then the method sees which candidates are preferred by one-on-one comparisons. Joe Shmoe can understand this because when the news comes on, it just shows the comparison of the winner to every other candidate.

I'll show you politics in America: "I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Wait, there's one guy holding up both puppets!" "Shut up! Go back to bed America. Your government is in control. Here's Love Connection, watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer, you fucking morons!"

Here is the letter from SCO warning recipients of alleged copyright violations. I must tell you that the list of files has everyone I am hearing from falling on the floor laughing. We will be issuing a statement explaining why as soon as they recover.

Don't SCO's financial officers have a legal duty to shareholders to earn as much profit as possible? Sounds like SCO shareholders should be suing _now_, instead of waiting.

It's obvious to me that a lot of people _will_ be suing SCO when this all blows over and it turns out they squandered millions on a case they knew they couldn't win. But I think they should start now, and use this quarters' losses as their case.

"US copyright law grants the enduser the right to make a backup copy of any copyrighted material he owns"

Um, no, it doesn't. Software you *own* (not software that's licensed; guess which one most software is?), under section 117, and private audio copying under the Audio Home Recording Act, are exceptions to the rule. Take another look at 17 USC 106. Reproduction is an exclusive right, still.

previous pump-n-dump speculation mentioned that there needed to be 4 quarters of profitabliy before Darl got a big bonus kick-in

That wasn't really speculation... That part of Darl's contract was documented in one of SCO's SEC filings. [groklaw.net] If he made SCO made a profit for four consecutive quarters then Darl would get 150,000 stock options.

If you read the article though, he still gets a ton of options regardless of the four quarters of profitability... It will be interesting to watch when they start to vest.

4. The SCO file has a bunch of errors for things like TCP errors that aren't
in the Linux file at all.

5. The formatting of comments is very different.

In general, there is no way that the Linux code is a simple cut and paste of
the SCO code, at least at this level.

Maybe the code started out closer, but all that is left is symbols and numbers.
The numbers are arbitrary and vary from target to target. The symbols are a
part of the POSIX spec. The files are available under a BSD license. Just how
is this infringing on SCO's copyright and even if it were, just what are the
damages.

Right. That's why a better analogy (which is still flawed) is that of a crowbar.

The DMCA effectively outlaws the use or mere possession of a crowbar, because someone might use one to break open a door. Never mind that they have plenty of legitimate, useful uses besides breaking open a door -- or that you might have a need to break open your own door.

But the DMCA goes further than that. It's also illegal for me to sell one to you, or even give one to you, or to manufacture such an item. I can't even tell you where to buy one, even though I know the hardware store on Spicewood Springs sells them. I also can't tell you how to use a crowbar, and I certainly can't tell you how you might theoretically use one to break open a locked door -- even if you own the door in question. I can barely even acknowledge that such a tool exists.

Oh, and if you manage to find one, and manage to figure out how to break your door open with it, and you manage to get rid of the crowbar before the law shows up, you can still be arrested just for breaking your own locks!

I compared errno.h in Linux versions 1.0 (from 1994) and 2.4.20, and they're practically the same. Some additions have come in the later version, but a diff shows that only 8 lines were changed between the two versions, for a file originally 132 lines long. At least when it comes to errno.h, SCO is pulling stuff out of its arse.

Linus also had some interesting things to say on the LKML:

For example, SCO lists the files "include/linux/ctype.h" and "lib/ctype.h", and some trivial digging shows that those files are actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux (ie September of 1991). And I can state

- I wrote them (and looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed: the "toupper()" and "tolower()" macros are so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so;)

- writing them is no more than five minutes of work (you can verify that with any C programmer, so you don't have to take my word for it)- the details in them aren't even the same as in the BSD/UNIX files (the approach is the same, but if you look at actual implementation details

you will notice that it's not just that my original "tolower/toupper" were embarrassingly ugly, a number of other details differ too).In short: for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files are trivially written by me personally, with no copying from any UNIX code _ever_.

It's rather long, so read the rest at http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/12/22/137

Also, you might be interested to know that legally owned / properly licensed fully automatic weapons are almost NEVER used in the commission of armed crimes. I don't have a direct link handy, but that's from the FBI's own crime statistics.

That statistic applies to most legally owned and properly licensed firearms. Not just fully automatic weapons. Even legally owned and properly licensed handguns are rarely used in the commission of crime, even in states that permit concealed carry. While the numbers aren't quite as low as they are for fully automatic weapons and other similarly licensed arms they are still quite low.

The essential truth is few law abiding firearms owners ever commit armed crimes. On the other hand plenty of crimes are prevented by legally owned civilian firearms every day.

Linus commented that he himself remembers writing those files. Well, thanks to Kernel.org [kernel.org] and a little too much time on my hands, I did a little exploring.

Kernel 2.6.0 has errno.h in two files. To make my life a little easier, I combined the two files, errno.h and errno-base.h. In Kernel 2.3.50 it is one file.

Well, as we know, SCO is claiming that 2.4.21 is the kernel that started with the problems. If that is the case, assuming that SCO actually has a case then we have a problem.

But the thing is that the errno.h and errno-base.h in 2.6.0 and the errno.h in 2.3.50 have only one difference other than being split up and the appropriate location indicators. THe only difference is:#define E2BIG 7/*Argument list too long*/#define E2BIG 7/*Arg list too long*/

So if you buy SCO's argument they are saying that a comment is to blame on this. Again, this is an SCO FUD campaign, but come on.

It may sound unlikely, it may even BE unlikely... but fundamentally the 2nd Amendment is all about making sure that the ultimate power lies in the hands of "the people" where it belongs.

And it works. So well that some people now believe that a conversion to a tyranny is so unlikely that they argue for the elimination of guns as an unnecessary hazard - completely oblivious to WHY it is unlikely.

But it will only remain unlikely as long as a large part of the population is armed. The US has had a number of near-misses with tyranny even in recent times. Some examples:

In the period just before WWII, when the NAZIs were coming to power in Germany, the KKK actually HELD power (especially in law enforcement) in many of the towns, counties, and states of the US. Their ideology was similar. But in the US people were able to resist with firearms. (My wife is here because, in separate incidents, her grandfather and mother held off the Klan in battle.) So while the NAZIs were able to suppress opposition and rise to power in Germany, the Klan in the US was held at bay, and finally defeated, in thousands of tiny battles.)

Nixon, president during the peak of the '60s anti-war movement (with a terrorist faction that makes Alkaida look tame), actually hired a think-tank to examine what would happen if he suspended the presidential election. Answer: That would precipitate the population to oust him by armed might and restore the election - and this would succeed, mainly because over half the population was armed and partly because some of the military would side with them.

(Of course not all near-misses were averted by an aroused, armed population, or the threat of one. For instance, there was the "Butler Plot" [members.shaw.ca] in 1933, when the heads of several of the US' largest corporations plotted a coup to replace Roosevelt with a fascist regime under general Butler. Butler was appalled, went to a congressional committee (the predecessor of HUAC) about it, and the plot was suppressed. Imagine if they'd found a more sympathetic general...)